Efficient multi-view 3D video multicast with depth image-based rendering in LTE networks

With the recent emergence of naked-eye 3D mobile devices and various 3D-enabled laptops, service providers are now faced with the opportunity to provide mobile 3D video streaming in LTE networks. Different from traditional single-view 3D videos, multi-view 3D videos allow users to choose preferred view angles and thus are promising for new applications, such as free-viewpoint television (FTV). Enabling multi-view 3D video services may also overwhelm the network when transmitting all views of every video. Fortunately, depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) allows each mobile client to synthesize the desired view from a nearby left view and right view, so that not all views of a video are necessary to be transmitted. Nevertheless, we need to carefully choose the transmitted views to limit the video distortion and minimize the bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we formulate a new optimization problem, called View and MCS Selection Problem (VMS) to minimize the bandwidth consumption for multi-view 3D video multicast in LTE networks. An algorithm, called View and MCS Aggregation (VMAG) is proposed to find the optimal solution of VMS. Simulation results manifest that the bandwidth consumption can be effectively reduced by over 30%.